Day: March 20, 2017

Tonight, Caristico meets Mephisto once again in the main event of Arena Puebla show, for Mephsito’s welterweight championship. They ran this match two months ago in Arena Mexico, where it was pretty good. It should be about the same in Puebla, probably with the same outcome. The show also has a Zeuxis/Princesa Sugehit lightning match, as the women continue to feud after their title change. CMLL usually runs an Arena Mexico Anniversary show on the last Friday of April (04/28 this year), and it’s at least possible Zeuxis/Sugehit or Soberano/Misterioso could be headed to an important match on that show.

The rest of the show is trios. The semimain is a Azul/Pierroth rematch, with Niebla, Terrible and Los Ingobernables filling the other spots. Lestat continues his travels into the midcard, teaming with Rey Cometa & Stigma against Kraneo, Luciferno and Morphosis. This would be Morphosis’ first CMLL match since losing his mask, but he lost his mask as Histeria. I wouldn’t think he would wear the mask as Morphosis either (after experimenting with a new mask, he was basically wearing his Histeria mask for the last couple years), but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. Or if he wasn’t on the show, which seems to happen with him. Espiritu & Policeman continue their one sided feud in the semimain, with Rey Samuray & Zaeta Roja as tecnicso and Cancerbero & Raziel as the rudos. Meyer, Paris, Vega versus King Jaguar, Rey Apocalispis and Toro Bill Jr. open the show.

CultIcon has a preview. The show starts at 9pm local, which is still one hour later than usual in the US. It’ll be on YouTube as normal.

El Tijuanese, writing about The Crash, says they’re “close to reaching a deal” with Moody Jack Melendez. Konnan has been saying nice things about Melendez recently. The article says they’re in talks for a TV channel to broadcast their network.

ROH announced Volador Jr. & Will Ospreay vs Dragon Lee & Jay White for their 04/01 show Florida. Volador & Dragon Lee have been in ciberneticos against each other, and there was a Arena Xalapa show with a Parka family vs Munoz family trios match (that may not have happened), but this would be the first time those two are on opposite sides of a recorded match.

(AAA & Impact/Anthem also announced an alliance. The recap has no more details on it.)

Air Date: 03/25 & 04/01.

The building looked full. It might have not been capacity – AAA always cuts off some of the seats to fit in the entrance – but they probably sold as many tickets as they could. Arena Coliseo Monterrey with CMLL luchadors did not do nearly as well. (Calling this show Rey de Reyes helped. If there’ anything to take from this weekend, it’s that branding events will help over the course of a few years.)

Like we saw in Apizaco, the card announced and the matches which took place changed. It was a lot more in order than content tonight, though changing how they were doing the Rey de Reyes tournament was pretty noticeable. It’s still going to take time to figure out how much of this is a purposeful attempt to make the shows feel more unpredictable and how much of this is AAA announcing lineups and then changing the creative process behind them. Neza might have been done before the change, but nothing past that has been announced (so there shouldn’t need to be more reshuffling after that, unless reshuffling is just supposed to be part of the feel of the show.)

My first impression was that it’s good to be known to the LU crew. Mundo won, Aerostar won, Argenis won (?!?!), Kevin Kross debuted. Kross is working LU dark matches and is signed so may show up in vignettes, but AAA hasn’t been bringing in many foreigners so someone had go to the back to him, probably off that Lucha Underground experience. (Kross might be getting a new name. I wonder if Vibora is next?) On the other hand, Mundo beat two other people on LU, Aerostar wasn’t losing his mask and Argenis – well, I can’t explain Argenis. And there’s other non-LU people who had a good day: Ayako Hamada isn’t on LU, and I can reveal that Carta Brava, Soul Rocker and Mocho Cota Jr. do not show up in the Temple in Season 3 to cause havoc.

Maybe the LU idea is that everyone gets something to do, and everyone gets a chance to be stars. AAA’s biggest hole is in upper level guys, and they gave big moments to a lot of people. I don’t know if the fans are going to accept Carta Brava, Soul Rocker and Mocho Cota as a faction taking on Dr. Wagner’s mask, but AAA is more interesting with them trying to do instead of just wrestling 40 straight weeks of openers in slightly different combinations. Argenis as Rey de Reyes winner is going to look so strange in the list of winners for quite a while, but there might be a bigger plan here – he’s in that Cruiserweight title match in Neza, assuming that it doesn’t change.

Mundo being both heavyweight and cruiserweight champion at the same time is sorta goofy but, as person who hates pretty much every single title belt in Mexico, I don’t have a problem with having less champions. None of the belts have been treated in a meaningful way, reducing the number of champions might help, Mundo’s the most close to being a big deal of the three right now, and it’d be a big moment if they spent five months building to Fatansma or Texano winning the titles back at TripleMania. They could do Texano/Fantasma vs Kross/Mundo in between as build up. Long term, I’d like to see the Latin American title dumped because there’s not enough TV to make three different singles titles useful, and something changed with the cruiserweight title if there’s not going to be any meaningful difference between it and heavyweight. It’s Mexico so I’m sure we’ll see those belts split apart at some point.

Mary talked about the skull fracture this week on TV. She was out for years before with a head injury, and the recap makes it sound like she might not be back any time soon from this one. The injury appears to have happened before Faby won the trios belts – maybe tehy didn’t realize how bad it was? Maybe something else is going on? Ricky Marvin took the loss to Faby and hasn’t been in AAA since, including not being on this show when AAA was getting everyone on the show. I dunno. Faby was the surprise first person out of the Reina de Reinas match, but Ayako Hamada being champion opens the door for Faby to go back to challenging to that title, which helps if she doesn’t have a healthy family member to team with.

These tapings are now a lot harder to judge just based on results and photos since things are actually happening. It’s going to take actually seeing it to have an idea about how all these things are working.

EDIT: things I thought about too late

all the AAA photos show Super Fly with a short hair cut, not bald. Hmmm.

main event seemed set up to give Vampiro a hero moment, which is not so great. But he appears to no longer a mysterious person off stage and an actual person who is seen.